Affiliation:
1. Faculty of Law Charles University, nám. Curieových 7, Praha, 116 40 Czech Republic
Abstract
Inconvenient information about the performance of public institutions may undermine public trust. In an experiment, I test how information about sentencing disparities among judges in the Czech Republic affects respondents' perception of the judicial system. I find no effect on respondents' declared institutional trust and willingness to rely on the formal judicial system. Instead, the information marginally increased respondents' policy involvement: they became more likely to (i) sign a petition that invites politicians to address the underlying issue, and (ii) consider the fairness of the judicial system to be a more important policy issue. The increased interest in signing the petition was driven by mothers, who are arguably more sensitive to the particular treatment information in the presented case of a failure to pay alimony.
Subject
Economics and Econometrics
Reference36 articles.
1. Trust in State and Nonstate Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan
2. Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital, and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges
*
3. AP News(2020).China exonerates doctor reprimanded for warning of virus. AP News 20 March; available online athttps://apnews.com/article/virus‐outbreak‐accidents‐ap‐top‐news‐international‐news‐arrests‐6f2e666485e9abae4bb112251eca77be(accessed 29 May 2023).
4. The Econometrics of Randomized Experiments a
5. Searching Racism after George Floyd